There's a basement

Wednesday, 13 April 2016

Social media is a nice window into people’s heads now. And by extension inside the current culture. Then there’s phenomena like selfies and just when I thought it can’t get any fucking worse the following kind came up;

So you’re sitting there at the restaurant table with minimum two other people, going over the menu to order drinks and you take out your phone and do this. It’s so much more depressing when I go ahead breaking down the steps you took. .fuck, let’s get it out of the way:

The thought pops in your head that you should share. this. to. facebook. cringessst moment?

You take out the phone and go to the app.

Type out the place's name, select it from the dropdown then choose the correct location.

Tag all those with you, for which you again have to type.

You have to use a touch screen for all the typing.

Damn, why? How come you’re not sharing a memory from your childhood or discussing Elon musk with those present with you? There are two other human beings sitting with you doesn’t that mean anything now? The more I think about step 1 here, the most I seem to lose faith in humanity and the fact that it just doesn’t pass but you have to follow it through till step 5, fuck that 2-5 is work to me. What is the motivation?

. . if you’re doing this when you are just with one person, there’s got to be special place in hell for you.

Moving on SM also gives you a glimpse of how and what people think and believe, something which you would have only found out about a person through a close relationship is now a page refresh away. Not anything exactly bad here though. Just depresses you and makes you realize most people just don't think in the right direction and hence human progress is so slow. I’m not finding a way to put the phenomena in words by itself I think it’s best understood by some examples I have collected.

This tweet for me embodies everything that’s wrong with the world and probably always has been.

I can almost hear her internal monologue when she was typing this out; “huh, writing is a means for change, it’s something so deep and meaningful and should serve a higher purpose and bring about a change in the world and Tim chooses to exchange it for for money, money which he will use to buy shampoo and toilet paper with and meet his bare materialistic needs with. Someone tell him pen is mightier than the sword already. .wtf! ridic!”.

Anything done for money is inherently morally inferior to this breed of people. The hatred I think is not towards the money, it’s the act of making money. The act being work. In such people's mind the idea of work has been associated with a form of slavery for so long now that work has to be form of a sisyphean task, something which the doer grudges and hates and finds no value in but only does it out of necessity to fill his stomach and have clothes on his body.

And writing, writing is not that grudging task which one hates. Writing is one’s deepest expressions put into words and he decides to make it dirty by making money from it!

For centuries now wealth has only gone to two categories of people, the looters and the moochers — the ones who take what they want at gunpoint and the others with tears. Doesn’t help that humanity also had a period of slave owning during which the wealthy got wealthier because they owned the workers, never had to pay them and today people project that on anybody (and on themselves) who gets up in the morning to head to a cubicle as fast as he can just to not displease the boss — the slave and the master.

And so we have a world in which for most people work is drudgery and making money a necessary evil. The two are then reconciled as work = slavery = which no one obviously likes and money = necessary evil to earn which you must go through the motions of work. And if one is using writing to make money then we have the equation where writing = work which is equal to drudgery which the above tweet can’t fathom to accept because writing is suppose to be this rainbow of colors of emotions, feelings and other liberal adjectives, a higher purpose and all the romanticism attached to it. Because the culture believes writing is a born talent and an artist just is but can’t become.

Their biggest victory is probably how they seem to have convinced a lot of men and women that women are morally superior and inherently better than man. A very powerful narrative to accomplish this has been how all the wars humanity fought for so long were basically outcomes of male aggression and drive for violence and rapes of course. The wars caused by the ignorance of medieval ages, the poverty of its philosophy and culture was all summed up as “men are just violent, raging, raping monsters”. And today they’re teaching young 9 year old boys how their gender has always been and continues to be a big problem.

They ignore how the male drive fueled by testosterone connected continents by railway lines, sent rockets to space and built the brooklyn bridge. To that they counter that women were simply oppressed and hence couldn’t get much done. Which is an amazing claim when you take into account that even in the last decade women have not made as much impact with all the empowerment in the world and that in the the first world. The culture of keeping women and children safe back home while men fought the barbarians at the city gates, they termed it oppression. The idea of keeping women at home to look after the house and children in a world in which their lower upper body strength would not have added much to the workforce and the technology to do anything more was simply absent they termed patriarchy.

The culmination of all this is the gender which created the human civilization and maintains it, is now forever psychologically crippled with being labelled a violent rapist while he accidentally brushes against a woman’s ass in a crowded bus, a harasser if he dares say “hi” to a cute girl walking by in a mall and an outright desperate creep if he completely places his palm on the small of a woman’s back during waltz and must spend every minute of his life proving otherwise.

The modern motivation

In the early 2000s do you remember ever seeing a guy with a big sign with something like the following walking around andheri station or on the platform? I sure don’t. Wonder what were the spartans doing to let everyone know that they just started climbing mountains as part of their combat training.

I give it to you that this is sort of grey area, I don’t want to make it sound like people are going to the restaurants and pubs just so they can put it up on facebook or that they’re going for those cool treks just for putting it up ( alot of guys go with the hopes of getting a gf too..imagine not get laid but get a gf) . .but jesus fucking christ isn’t that what it looks like?

I remember reading something which said that the chemical release you get in the brain when you tell people about your goals/plans is the same as the one when you actually attain them. And I pretty much believe that’s what fucks politicians up when they’re out there making the promises, then later the chemical release is over and so are the elections so fuck you citizen.

Oh and this dude totally did not give up drinking I can assure you that. In fact let me take this opportunity to tell you a trick—tell fucking no one about your goals or in fact tell me people the opposite maybe. Bottle up all your dreams and ambitions and plans inside and just fucking don’t talk about it, maybe you could blog about it (i’m not sure about that) but tell no one in your fucking life about them. This way when they talk about their goals the memory of yours will stir but hey you can’t fucking tell them about it and this will remind you how you are just sitting there wasting precious fucking time, it’ll fucking eat you inside and that’s good. And if you can’t do that, you can’t have your goals deep in you and work on them without talking about it then you might as well forget about the whole thing and go watch roadies or IPL.

Greatness by proxy

Enterprises use proxy servers to provide safe and better internet use to its employees. So when you want to get to google, your connection goes to the proxy server, the proxy terminates it and starts its own connection to google and bridges both the connections thus having full control over the traffic in motion.

But let’s say your destination is a little more complex than google. It takes toil, sweat and tears to get there. It takes sacrificing your sleep, social life, your favorite food and everything else you’d rather do and even then you might not get there.

Your destination is greatness.

Well now a lot of people have now found an expressway to get there, they just count themselves in with those who are close.

Supporting your country’s cricket team is all good but my bs detectors are going off when I see how far people have taken that and I’m not sure if it’s just fandom anymore. It’s definitely not patriotism either, a patriot would find a lot more important things to focus his energies on.

My best guess is it’s just a mix of fitting in with the crowd and be excited about what everyone is excited about and of course the yearning to be a part of something big, that same feeling which brought so many to the Anna Hazare anti-corruption rallies.

But since nobody likes to think of themselves as just a two cent attention whore and everybody likes to tell think of themselves as people who don’t care about fitting in and pay lip service to individuality, the real intentions are masked by the culture as fandom and patriotism.

“The Alluring Snap”

What’s with guys thinking that every time a chick posts her pic online, a contest has started and one with the best phrase will be the first one who she opens her legs for. This isn’t Who wants to be a millionaire phone lines dammit.

Scroll up and read the last comment again — “alluring snap”. Seriously when did you say something like that to a chick? That’s like breaking into

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Every time you visit the mall, (I know most guys never say anything to a girl in a mall, that’s a different topic).

What gets me tickled is again the process of how he got to that comment, he scanned all the previous comments and saw that “looking good”, “fabulous”, “cute” and other variants thereof were taken, which forced him to push his english language skills to the limit, something he has not done since the last essay he wrote for the english paper not to mention a lot of people by heart their essays in India, I digress. Now as he was doing this, it then slowly became both an ego problem about his english skills “ofcrse i knw gud eng” he thought, “btr than all dese suckrs trying 2 get luky”. And a race to be the chosen one was always on his mind anyway “i’ll blw her mind here nw...thn wil say hi ltr in d chat. .mst buy kondums”.